Nature_and_Environment.91

Ethical architecture

Ethics is often presented as a question of what should be done;
for Borgmann, it is also a question of what should be built. There
is a tangible and material side to [ethics] We make things like North
Reserve or the river corridor and ethics gets built into material
objects. I think theres little consciousness of how that happens and
consequently we often do the wrong thingI should say we make the
wrong thing.

Specialist cultures have not been imposed as some sort of
totalitarian regime upon an unsuspecting populace. We arrived
where we are as a result of a string of choices that were made, all
of which seemed to make sense at the time, beginning many years
ago. Some even argue that the tide of history swells inexorably
from the general to the specific. Clearly, the great achievements
of the past century would have been impossible without
specialists. Neither jet airplanes nor electron microscopes would
ever have been developed in a culture populated only with
subsistence farmers, of course. So by advocating for a vernacular
system of architecture, do we become Luddites that call for nothing
other than a simple agrarian existence?

Not at all. It should be possible for a single culture to support
specialists that do the things that only specialists can do, while
at the same time supporting vernacular systems that operate well
without specialists. If six million people come this year to visit
the Tuscan hill town of Pienza that was built by medieval farmers,
then it clearly can be argued that specialists are not required to
build places that bring great delight. Some may point out that the
great Renaissance masters were without doubt specialists, but while
they were clearly geniuses, they were also still part of a
traditional system that spanned from the vernacular to the classical.

As a matter of fact, popular trends are answering this question for
us. Look at the number of people in the US that are building
pieces or sometimes all of their own houses. Home Depot and Lowe's
aren't doing a booming business with conventional builders, but with
homeowners. As a matter of fact, the builders don't even like
these establishments most of the time because they are populated
with people who aren't using builders. Look also at trends in
health care, where increasing numbers of people are treating
themselves with natural remedies rather than going to the doctor for
every ache or scratch. Health food stores were considered by many
people to be the province of "kooks" thirty years ago. Not
anymore. Other aspects of culture are following.